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I wonder if it's a case where different people feel different things. I've never felt something I could call "faith", but my brother has and does. Faith doesn't
by Zababa 5y ago
I wonder if it's a case where different people feel different things. I've never felt something I could call "faith", but my brother has and does. Faith doesn't seem like something that you can fake or develop. In that case, pursuing faith-based religion sounds like a bad idea for me. Maybe that's something you can develop?
- escapedmoose 5y agoThis essay also left lots of room for a non-religious person to adopt the same kind of non-ownership mindset. Maybe we should infer that this kind of happiness is something that could be cultivated without religious faith.
- Zababa 5y agoI don't know about non religious, but this part: > This means, against Hägglund, that the person best positioned to love and enjoy life is precisely the one who has made peace with its loss. In the language of Fear and Trembling, Abraham can’t really love Isaac until he is prepared to give him up. reminds me a lot of the concept of impermanence in Buddhism.
- escapedmoose 5y agoKierkegaard being an existentialist, I was thinking along the lines of secular existentialism. I like this line of his, on the topic of Abraham’s sacrifice: > Abraham ‘resigned everything infinitely, and then took everything back on the strength of the absurd’ “Making peace with the loss” of meaning/reason in the world seems a good secular parallel.
- giraffe_lady 5y agoNah you can both fake and develop it if that's what you're into. If you act as if something is true long enough eventually your brain will force you to believe it, or to stop those acts. Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else. All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does.
- Zababa 5y ago> If you act as if something is true long enough eventually your brain will force you to believe it, or to stop those acts. So there's a chance you won't ever believe in it? That sounds liek what I was saying. > Plus anyway believers are neither inherently stupid nor possessing fundamentally different brain structures or anything that would enable a different set of experiences from everyone else. That's the part I doubt. I'm not saying I am or they are smarter, I don't think it has anything to do with intelligence. I just think people can have widely different personal experiences, and some people lack faith. There are a few mentions of this, either being called "dark night of the soul" or "spiritual dryness": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_dryness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_dryness. > All honest believers are also nonbelievers to some extent or at different times. What actions you take in the face of that contradiction is basically what defines your belief these days, as much as your creed does. That's true when you consider people from an external perspective. I was asking about internal experiences.
- tasha0663 5y agoLike courage, faking it in order to act in the face of its absence is actually the genuine article.
- Zababa 5y agoThis doesn't sound true and doesn't seem to reflect the experience of the people around me.